


and in another life

by someoneanyone



Category: Mushishi, モノノ怪 | Mononoke (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Gen, a buddy cop movie no one asked for, and is not a movie, how to make your medicine seller lighten up a little maybe, no one is friends, strangers to danger to pals, that has no cops, where the crime has yet to be discovered
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-21
Updated: 2020-04-21
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:08:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 952
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23762857
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/someoneanyone/pseuds/someoneanyone
Summary: A never-ending cycle, an inevitably repeating pattern. What should cause this instance to be any different?
Relationships: Ginko and the Medicine Seller, kayo and the medicine seller
Comments: 5
Kudos: 49





	and in another life

**Author's Note:**

> hello and welcome to my wonderful rambling circus pull up a chair take a look around the show is about to begin

Ginko has been caught in the rain more times than he cares to count, and he doesn’t mind, really. In the summer. When the nights are warm. When he is not trapped in the middle of nowhere, in the winter, where it’s just on the wrong side of snow.

He should have listened to the townsfolk-- you  _ always _ listen to locals-- but, in his defense, he’d eaten up a good number of miles since then, and had only about one more to go until he reached his destination.

That was a mountain mile, though. In the cold, cold rain. With nothing but pebbles for company. He could have waited the night through, keeping someone’s grandparents entertained, telling stories by a fire. As he crested the next rise, he thought nostalgically of being tied up in a villager's shed. At least then he had had a roof over his head. He had not had to struggle to hang on to his allegedly-waterproof tarp, forever attempting to escape into the night wind, while hiking unfamiliar terrain in the pitch black. (He had, at one point, been in possession of a lantern. He had, somewhere in the course of the past twenty minutes, sacrificed it in the hopes of being able to keep the tarp.)

He, of all people, ought to know better than to rush headlong into accepting all-too-convenient blessings, but it is these circumstances that, when he spots a cozy-looking overhang with a bright fire burning, cause him to not really think twice about bumbling in. At worst, he figures, someone will try to rob him, and he knows from experience that they never know to take anything that’s actually difficult to replace. Also, he would thank them for it, if they clubbed him over the head and he woke up to the morning sunshine predicted by his would-be host.

He does not get robbed, except in the sense that there is no fire, and perhaps also in that he is not immediately knocked unconscious. 

There is only a lantern, and a stranger.

X

The Medicine Seller is not, generally speaking, a being in possession of particularly great patience or understanding. He has, quite frequently, found himself happily bereft of both, due as much to his temperament as to the nature of the situations which call him.

This would be unfortunate, were he not also blessed with a sense of humor. (And addtionally: opium.)

In the beginning of his workings, a sudden storm would have hurried him along; people driven indoors, to private, enclosed spaces, often meant trouble by the time a mononoke’s presence required his intervention. He had once taken such threats seriously.

That approach had quickly become unworth the trouble. He had found, of late, that it was far more amusing to allow whatever grievance an ayakashi carried to boil over, and to arrive just as it erupted.

In addition to being objectively very much entertaining, it also put the humans involved into an accelerated timeline; the more they lied, the longer they attempted to disguise from themselves and those around them the weight of their actions, the more dire the stakes tangibly became. There was no, “heed me or else," few hurried explanations, little need for tact or diplomacy; he simply had to go about his business, and the mononoke would ensure its prey either aided him or perished.

This meant patience and understanding were almost utterly unnecessary, and a sense of humor was critical to his continued sanity.

So, as he is waiting underneath a cliffside for the storm to subside and the stars, so to speak, to align, and a human wanders in to join him and interrupt his last semblance of soltitude for the forseeable future, he smiles.

X

Mushishi tend not to be superstitious.

This is a hotly debated topic by those outside of the trade-- are they not dispensaries of such pearls as “do not whistle on boats at night”? do they not recommend the avoidance of certain woods, or songs, or sounds when lost in the dark? do they not insist upon the existence of myth and monsters?-- but Ginko has always considered himself to be something of a scholar above all else. The mushi, such as they are, are very unlike creatures as most would know them-- but they are only another part of life. As all creatures do, they therefore follow their own rules and patterns: they’re recognizable in type, shape, and function, given enough study; they have their own place in the world; they can be _understood_.

Ginko has never dedicated much thought to superstitions as they are held by the people he has come across in his journeys. Often, the things they believe to be caused by the supernatural or held at bay by ritual are a result of mushi, or otherwise simply have mundane causes in the world observable by any willing or able to devote the time to a study. There are few times he has found this faith in the order of the order of the universe to be shaken.

He will admit that stumbling across a fantastically dressed, smirking figure wrapped in pipe smoke in the only visible shelter for miles may have been one of those moments. He begins to wish his pack were not so thoroughly wrapped in its own tarp.

"Uh," he says, once he gets past the smoke (from a pipe), and the clothes (a costume?), and the facpaint (hence the smirk), and the lantern that has no business being quite that bright or casting such stark shadows (something added to the flame?). "Would you mind if I join you?"

"Not at all."

At least he will be out of the rain.

**Author's Note:**

> so ends the opening act who's ready for me to really hit the lights
> 
> in other words: idk what i'm doing and i haven't fully committed to writing this smash that kudos button if this is the not-movie that YOU have been asking for and want to see mean people fight a ghost while dunking on each other. i probably don't have anything better to do rn tbh. 
> 
> also sorry it's so short i'm just. in the process of investing myself in this. i haven't written an actual full-length story since like 2016. what a world amiright.


End file.
